SAVING ENERGY IS HARD LESSON TO LEARN

Thirty years ago, the heavily populated northeastern section of the United States experienced a shortage in heating oil.

For most people, this was one of the earliest harbingers of tighter supplies in much of the energy Americans consume.

Around 1970, residential customers in the New York area were told to turn down their thermostats or face costly surcharges from heating-oil companies for using more fuel than the previous year.

For most customers, reducing the consumption of heating oil was fairly easy.

That's because Americans are the world's biggest energy consumers by far, thanks to a free-market system that has pretty much ensured adequate supplies and relatively low costs.

But even then, some conservation-minded consumers were caught in a squeeze.

These were the consumers who had, over the years, developed habits for saving fuel: keeping the thermostat low, wearing sweaters indoors, turning the furnace even lower during sleeping hours and so forth.

For these folks, avoiding the surcharge was a near impossibility.

And as soon as the heating-oil shortage diminished, the surcharges -- and any other incentive to save on fuel consumption -- went away.

When the Cape Girardeau School District learned a few weeks ago that it might have to come up with $1 million in funding for the new Career and Technology Center, officials were glad the district already had a penny-pinching plan in place. The district has, for quite some time, adopted many of the cost-saving ideas any family might use to keep the bills low.

So why isn't this frugality the norm instead of the exception?

As Californians are uncomfortably discovering, learning to cut back is a tough lesson.

It is a learning process that relies mostly on negative incentives. For example, failure to reduce electricity consumption in California has meant rolling blackouts. So the state has started a multimillion-dollar campaign to educate state residents about the benefits of being frugal. But failure to comply means fines.

There are estimates that the United States could, over the next 20 years, reduce overall energy consumption by 30 percent without diminishing our lifestyle or productivity. To do so would require people to change their habits, and as anyone on a diet knows, this is hard to do without some positive rewards.

Those of you who turn off lights, take short showers, purchase fuel-efficient automobiles, keep the thermostat low during the winter and high during the summer and only turn on the dishwasher when it's full already have good energy-saving habits. But most of us use as much energy as we like - until it becomes too expensive.